WASHINGTON – Black, Hispanic and white drivers are equally likely to be pulled over by police, but blacks and Hispanics are much more likely to be searched and arrested, a federal study found.

Police were much more likely to threaten or use force against blacks and Hispanics than against whites in any encounter, whether at a traffic stop or elsewhere, according to the Justice Department.

The study, released yesterday, covered police contacts with the public during 2005 and was based on interviews by the Census Bureau with nearly 64,000 people age 16 or older.

“The numbers are very consistent” with those found in a study of police-public contacts in 2002, said statistician Matthew Durose, the report's co-author.

Traffic stops have become a volatile issue. Minority groups have complained that many stops and searches are based on race rather than on legitimate suspicions. Blacks in particular have complained of being pulled over simply because of their race.

“The available data is sketchy but deeply concerning,” said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. The civil rights organization has done its own surveys of traffic stops, and he said the racial disparities grow larger the deeper the studies delve. He called for federal legislation that would collect uniform data by race on stops, arrests, use of force, searches and hit rates – the number that actually result in finding a crime.

Like the 2002 report, this one contained a warning that the racial disparities uncovered “do not constitute proof that police treat people differently along demographic lines” because the differences could be explained by circumstances not analyzed by the survey. The 2002 report said such circumstances might include driver conduct or whether drugs were in plain view.

Traffic stops are the most frequent way police interact with the public, accounting for 41 percent of all contacts. Police stopped an estimated 17.8 million drivers in 2005.

Black, Hispanic and white motorists were equally likely to be pulled over by police – between 8 percent and 9 percent of each group.

The racial disparities showed up after that point:

Blacks (9.5 percent) and Hispanics (8.8 percent) were much more likely to be searched than whites (3.6 percent). There were slight but statistically insignificant declines compared with the 2002 report in the percentages of blacks and Hispanics searched.

Blacks (4.5 percent) were more than twice as likely as whites (2.1 percent) to be arrested. Hispanic drivers were arrested 3.1 percent of the time.

Among all police-public contacts, force was used 1.6 percent of the time. But blacks (4.4 percent) and Hispanics (2.3 percent) were more likely than whites (1.2 percent) to be subjected to force or the threat of force by police.